To Go There is (Possibly) To Destroy The Magic: Thoughts on "The Last of Us" Getting a Sequel

This post contains major spoilers for The Last of Us.


I'm not sure I really wanted a sequel to The Last of Us.

What makes the original such a great game isn't its mechanics. Cover shooter, stealth elements, a crafting system: all very well done, but hardly innovative. What elevates the game is its storytelling, and, I would say, very specific elements of its storytelling at that. The setting has been much praised, but to my mind it's mostly a standard zombie apocalypse. The stages of the fungal infection make a nice excuse to have four different types of zombie, but that's about it for originality. Which is why I've never seen the appeal of a "different characters, same world" sequel. The only benefit over a different post-apocalyptic setting that would give greater narrative freedom is being able to use runners, stalkers, clickers, and bloaters again, and I feel like the original pretty much exhausted the gameplay potential of those enemies.

Even praising the plot of The Last of Us is a little misleading. Its turns are largely predictable if you have any experience with this kind of narrative. It's obvious from the second Ellie and Joel meet that the emotional core of the story will be the development of a bond between them and the consequences of that bond. You know that appealing characters like Tess, Sam, and Henry will be killed off in service to the grimness of the setting. The reason these developments are effective anyway is that they're executed with a skill and a subtlety that remains extremely rare in video game writing, direction, and performance.

Not to be a downer here, but I'm also not especially excited by the prospect of a Last of Us film. It'd be nice for new audiences to experience the story, but the version the game tells is good enough for me. And even a perfect translation of the story wouldn't feel as special, because high-quality execution isn't as rare in movies as it is in video games. That is, when I say that The Last of Us is perhaps the best-executed video game story I've ever experienced, you have to understand that this involves grading on a curve. Most video game dialogue is stilted and achingly on-the-nose, performed by actors who are competent but not capable of spinning straw into gold. Neil Druckmann understands the value of silence, indirection, and inarticulacy in creating a credible and immersive story, and Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, and the other actors know what to do with the material. The result is a small triumph, the elevation of a standard narrative into something profoundly effective.

So why am not excited that those same people are making a sequel? Well, aside from the obvious fear that lightning won't strike twice, I feel like it's going to be very, very difficult to follow up on the ending of the original without spoiling it. I get the sense that a lot of people want Ellie to find out what Joel did, but I don't think any of the possible outcomes of that development are worth showing. Everything that could happen between them is implicit in the final cutscene of the first game, and it's the ambiguities of that moment-- does she believe him? does she care?-- that make it powerful. If she's shown to find out, all that happens is that she forgives him eventually or she doesn't. The former makes for artificial, time-marking drama rather than an evolution in the characters' relationship, and the latter slides toward excessive grimdark bleakness.

What I would hope for is that it's either dealt with quickly-- someone tells her, and she says, "Yeah, I pretty much knew that"-- or that it doesn't come up at all. The latter would be better, I think. In stories these kinds of terrible deceptions always come out, but that's not how life works. Sometimes liars get away with it. And consider how much quiet drama there would be in having that cloud over Joel and Ellie's every interaction, one more thing never quite stated.

That's what I'd like, but I don't think it's going to happen. They're going to have to bring it out into the open. The expectation is going to be too strong. What Druckmann said about this game being "about hate" is pretty suggestive. And I'm sure that, as with the first one, the obviousness of it will be offset by skillful execution. I'm certainly looking forward to the game, anyway. Cool trailer, great visuals. I just hope Naughty Dog's confidence that they've found a story worth telling is untainted by the inevitable pressure to follow up on a tremendously popular property. The unnecessary sequel is one feature of film storytelling that video games can do without.

Switched Off? (Last Switch Pun, I Promise)

As we get further away from the euphoria of that well-constructed if overlong launch trailer, my hopes for the Switch are diminishing. I say hopes, not enthusiasm, because I know I'm going to buy it and I'm pretty sure I'm going to love it, unless the portable unit is a lot clunkier than it looks. But I'm no longer as confident that the system's overall performance will be strong enough to draw in people who didn't buy a Wii U.

The possibility of portable versions of games that have previously been console-only has a lot of appeal. If the launch trailer was honest in suggesting portable Skyrim, that's going to be an extraordinary thing. (And if the launch trailer was being deceptive, that was incredibly stupid. Personally I see Bethesda's coyness on this topic as an effort not to pull focus from the HD remaster, but we'll see.) But it will only be extraordinary if the game performs adequately. Given how brutal Bethesda's open world load times are on consoles, I can only imagine what they might be like on the Switch. This is not a trivial problem for a system that may have a three-hour battery life, and the welcome reports that it will have a standard charger aren't enough to counter that. Especially since the same report suggests the system can't be charged while it's on a kickstand. If that positioning of the port was required by the hardware design, it's a shame; if it was just a cosmetic decision it's another case of Nintendo being bafflingly obtuse.

The question is whether issues like these will detract enough to draw people away from the appeal of portability. For established Nintendo fans (which does, I think, include some people who didn't buy the Wii U-- attachment to brands can be latent for a very long time), I predict it will be. It's the Playstation/Xbox/PC crowd that will be a question mark. And this is a place where Nintendo's traditional hardware weaknesses may be an asset. As I suggested in my last post, I think Nintendo was terribly misguided to put money into porting things like Arkham City and the Assassin's Creed games to the Wii U, because that wasn't going to be a sustainable practice, and console gamers knew it. The next-gen consoles weren't far off, and they were going to outclass the Wii U so thoroughly that developers would give up. The Wii was sold on first-party content and occasional ports of Nintendo-esque games, and the Wii U should have been sold the same way. But the Switch is different.

Unlike the Wii U, the Switch can get by with a library that's largely last-gen games, because it's making them portable. The lack of a competing handheld market is key here. Microsoft, of course, has never done the portable thing. The Vita mostly gets versions of PS4's shorter and simpler indie games, and while that's great for what it is, there's a lot to be said large-scale experiences on small-scale systems. The thing is, Nintendo needs a strong library of third-party titles to commit non-fans to the cost of a new system that may well be graphically inferior when transmitted to a television.. Bethesda is a get, but portable Skyrim is only going to help so much. If having From Software onboard means a Dark Souls or Bloodborne port that's also amazing, but again, not enough. I worry about a self-defeating cycle where too many devs hold back to see if the system sells enough, and the system doesn't sell enough because of a weak library caused by too many devs holding back. That was what doomed the Wii U even with Ubisoft on its side. (Or sort of on its side. The withdrawal of exclusivity for Rayman Legends was a real blow to the system, and the insistence on delaying the Wii U version to match the others was a kick while it was down.)

In the age of iterative consoles, getting people to buy the Switch is going to be even harder. If there's going to be an upgraded console in the middle of every generation, that's a serious hit to gamer finances, one that might make buying a portable on top of it seem positively self-indulgent. And yet, dedicated gamers have often been willing to buy both a console and a handheld, and Nintendo is in an excellent position to take over that dynamic, if it can only get the games. And that goes back to whether the hardware will be easy for developers to work with. It didn't take long for devs to publicly trash the Wii U.

I want the Switch to succeed, because its failure would create a real risk of Nintendo dropping out of the hardware market, and I don't want that. There's a certain strange appeal in the idea of Nintendo properties on other hardware, similar to the pleasing oddness of seeing Sonic on Nintendo systems after Sega's hardware line collapsed. (And imagine Nintendo games with achievements. Seriously, Nintendo, create an achievements system. They're everywhere for a reason.) But Nintendo is still trying to innovate with hardware in a way that its competitors aren't. It was the first to do motion controls and the first to do touchscreens, and now it's the first to try bridging the console/portable gap. The PlayStation and the Xbox have pretty much limited themselves to cosmetic upgrades. The PlayStation Camera and Kinect are peripherals in the truest sense of the word.

So there's a lot riding on the Switch. They're pretending this isn't the end of the 3DS, but anyone who consults its forthcoming lineup can see that's just rhetoric. Nintendo is putting all its eggs in one basket, which is fundamentally risky for a company that just dropped a crate's worth. I want to believe they can do it. But it's going to be a long wait for the launch lineup reveal in January.

Switched On, or How I Hope to Learn to Love Nintendo Again

So the Nintendo Switch is a thing. Exactly the thing it was rumored to be, in fact. Which is also exactly what I'd wanted it to be. Now the question is whether it can live up to that concept.

I'd been a Nintendo fanboy all my life. We had a Sega Genesis and a couple games for it when I was a kid, but I didn't play it much, and aside from that, I didn't own a non-Nintendo console until about 2010, when I borrowed my brother's PS2 to play the Kingdom Hearts games. Kingdom Hearts is the only reason I own non-Nintendo systems, actually. I bought a PS3 in 2014 to play the HD remasters, and got sucked into the brand enough that I bought a PS4 in April 2015 and a Vita in March 2016. (Yes, I bought a Vita. In 2016. I know. Shut up.) And those systems, plus the few Steam games my cruddy laptop can run, are pretty much the only games I play now. I used my 3DS, and then my 3DS XL, and then my New 3DS XL, a lot while the system was in its heyday. The Wii U, on the other hand...

I bought my Wii U at launch. The Deluxe bundle, and a copy of New Super Mario Bros. U on the side. I played Nintendo Land a little bit, and wrote a Miiverse post that said something like, "So much content. But how much of it will I play before I get bored?" Not very much, as it turned out. I doubt I booted the game up more than five times. NSMBU I did play all the way through. It was fine. Another not very innovative 2D Mario game, but those are like the later seasons of a long-running sitcom: professionally executed and amiable even though there's no spark. After that game, though...

Sorry for ending a second paragraph running with suggestive ellipses, but I actually did do the Internet equivalent of wandering off; I switched to a different tab, to look at a list of Wii U games. Because I was about to suggest, as I usually do when asking myself why I never clicked with the Wii U, that there weren't enough good games. And do you know what? That's silly. There are plenty of good Wii U games. I know that because I own them. I just don't play them. And that's because the Wii U is not a very good system.

There are a lot of reasons the Wii U failed, but I think talking too much about things like brand messaging and developer support overlooks the elephant in the room: the GamePad. And that's not a lightly chosen metaphor: the GamePad is indeed bulky, awkward, and undesirably difficult to maneuver. You can see what Nintendo were thinking-- tap (heh) into the tablet market, build on the two-screens success of the DS family-- but they overlooked some fairly obvious reasons that appeal wouldn't translate. Tablets and smartphones are fun because they're compact and portable. You can slide your game into your pocket and take it out the door. The GamePad's not going to fit in your pocket, and it'll lose the signal just past the doorway, even if you leave the door open. And the DS double screens work because they're very close together and one isn't a marked visual upgrade from the other. Shifting your gaze from the GamePad to a TV screen is hard to do smoothly, and the difference between an HDTV image and the GamePad screen means you won't want to anyway.

So the GamePad is less a game-changer, and more a really big controller with a screen in, a screen that very few games even require. I now suspect I'd have been better off buying a Wii U Pro Controller years ago, and when the best option for playing a lot of your games is the purchase of a separate controller that looks like what your competitors offer by default, well, that says something about the value of your concept, doesn't it, Nintendo? There were Wii games that were more natural on the Classic Controller (and why oh why did they never make one of those that stood alone and didn't have to be hooked to a Wii Remote?), but there were also plenty that made the Wiimote essential and enjoyable. The only Wii U game that does that for the GamePad is Super Mario Maker, which is lovely, but not enough so to be a literal only selling point.

The Switch, though, instantly makes a strong case for itself. Any gamer can see the appeal of breaking down the wall between console and portable. The question is what tradeoffs are involved. There would be no benefit, for example, in basically ditching console gaming in favor of a portable with a peripheral that casts its image to a TV screen. That's clearly not what the Switch is, thank God, but the question remains: how can Nintendo, which has lagged in hardware terms even when doing the traditional thing, produce games that will compete aesthetically with other home consoles while running effectively as portable experiences?

It's not about the Switch matching the PS4 and the Xbox One, or the PS4 Pro and the Xbox Scorpio, or whatever next year's iteration of those consoles will be. Nintendo doesn't win by competing in the most obvious ways with Sony and Microsoft, and I think forgetting that was one of their mistakes with the Wii U. (What was the good of putting money into porting Arkham City, getting those Assassin's Creed games, and resurrecting Bayonetta? How much profit did any of that actually bring Nintendo?) But even to match themselves, in keeping Switch games as gorgeous and large-scale as the Wii U's best and having them be playable portably, is not a small challenge. One early point of concern is the battery on the portable unit. It's being reported that the Switch has a "mediocre" battery life that may max out at three hours. If that's a literal maximum, it cuts hard into the main appeal of the system. The 3DS family has pretty crappy battery life, and three hours is more like its minimum than its max. If that kind of battery is an example of what Nintendo is willing to trade off to have something it can bill as a hybrid, the Switch may not be as fun as it looks.

But you know what? It still looks pretty damn fun. There was a lot of the usual why-won't-Nintendo-do-it-MY-way doom and gloom from the gaming press over the lack of news on the NX and the dangers of the rumored unconventional approach. The launch trailer has quieted a lot of that. Eventually the skepticism will creep back in, and (generally speaking) that's as it should be. We should all keep in mind, though, that Nintendo is resilient, and often does its best work not in the aftermath of success, but in the face of failure, because it learns from its mistakes. So I'm hopeful that it understands what the Switch needs to do, and has made smart tech decisions to help it get there.

And even if it hasn't, at least we're done with the Wii branding forever.

Whither Mario?

I recently read Alyse Knorr's Super Mario Bros. 3, the first in the new season from Boss Fight Books. (As a Kickstarter backer I got a digital copy of the book a little early.) It's a great read. Like most Boss Fight titles, it blends analysis with memoir to get at how and why video games mean so much to us. In the case of Super Mario Bros. 3, Knorr is understandably interested in how highly regarded a title it is, and how difficult it can be to separate considered appreciation for the game from simple nostalgia. That's a question that fascinates me too, because SMB 3 is the first Boss Fight subject that I instinctively think of as a great game. I know the reputations of many others, and I like the ones I've played, but SMB 3 is something else. Is that because it's the only one I played as a child?

To an extent, perhaps. But I don't think that's the only reason. For one thing, it isn't the only one I played as a child. I also had Super Mario Bros 2. That's arguably a Boss Fight subject more because of its interesting development history than because of the greatness of the final product, but what matters here is that it's a game I played and loved as a kid and don't feel especially fond of today. It's a competent platformer with some neat features, but I don't think anyone would grant it much of a place in history if it had stayed in its own skin. (Which raises another question-- would any Mario game be as highly regarded if you stripped away the series' trappings?-- but let's leave that for another time.) I could list more titles I don't love the way I used to, but that kind of evidence is hardly conclusive. The only other thing I want to mention is that I'm a little too young to have the particular history with SMB 3 of many gamers around my age.

I was born at the tail end of 1985, a couple months after the NES was released in North America, and I don't remember a time when we didn't have one. I've worked out that it must have been the Action Set bundle, which came out in 1988 and had two controllers, the Zapper, and a Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge, but in my earliest memories we already had a large library. The two Zelda games, Mickey Mousecapade. Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle. Mega Man 3. Dr. Mario. Super Mario Bros. 2. And Super Mario Bros. 3. There were no new NES games in my childhood, as there would be new games for every other system. So I didn't experience the anticipation for SMB 3 (I've never even seen The Wizard), or the appreciation of how it expanded the series' formula. It was just there, always. And I don't know that it was even a particular favorite. It was a little too hard for a kid my age, and I was always frustrated by losing progress with a game over. I was more comfortable with the original Zelda, Mega Man 3, and the cartoon-branded games.

So. Granting for the sake of argument that I'm not primarily nostalgic for a childhood experience, why do I regard SMB 3 so highly? For me it's a strong contender for the best Mario game ever. Knorr explores a number of the game's virtues: meticulous level design that, among other achievements, teaches the game's controls without the need for an overt tutorial; technical wizardry that got the most out of an aging system; art and enemy design that are engagingly quirky and playful; and music that melds perfectly with gameplay. Knorr's discussion of the latter is particularly good, capturing how the soundtrack works in terms accessible to those who don't think much about music.

The part of Knorr's argument that interests me most, though, involves exploration. She quotes the popular science writer Steven Johnson on how video games reward a "desire to see the next thing," and games scholar Henry Jenkins on the specialized form of topophilia that children experience as they explore, map, and lay claim to the neighborhoods in which they live, a form that is easily translated into the virtual world of video games. The themed worlds and the interactive (and lively) map screen, Knorr observes, are vital to how SMB 3 scratches that itch. This, I think, is vital, not just to the greatness of SMB 3, but to the successes and failures of subsequent Mario games, and the question of where the series ought to go next.

All Mario platformers allow for some degree of exploration. Even in the original Super Mario Bros. there are secrets and alternate routes to discover: hidden 1-Ups, pipe shortcuts, beanstalks. But the inability to move backward within a level and the lack of a map screen frustrate the sense of ownership that is the reward for thorough exploration, and the overall brevity of the game means that there's little room for branching paths and the choices they allow. Part of the power of exploration is deciding for yourself where to go next, and SMB 1 offers only the option to skip a bunch of levels within the fixed order. SMB 3 has that via the Warp Whistles (which also make the process feel much cooler-- you're flying!), and it ups the ante with non-linear world structures that give players the choice to move forward by completing, for example, World 1-3 or World 1-4. Or both, if they're completists. Which is the other benefit of branching: doing both of an either/or feels like even more of an accomplishment, a fun form of extra credit. Beating a game isn't true mastery anymore; now you have to clear all the levels, and maybe trigger a Treasure Ship or two along the way.

Getting a Treasure Ship was a great pleasure when I played SMB 3 as a child, in part because I wasn't quite sure why it was happening. I knew it had something to do with how many coins you collected, but the other variables were beyond me. I knew a lot of the game's other secrets, though: dropping behind the scenery in World 1-3, getting the Warp Whistle in the first fortress, how to run at the goal box just right to get a star card. Tips and tricks like these, and getting the hang of the concentration and slot machine mini-games, offered a lot more room for mastery than memorizing the locations of 1-Ups and beanstalks. And a map screen where every completed level has the hero's calling card makes it a lot easier to track your progress: a trail of breadcrumbs through the virtual forest.

Super Mario World carries forward this joy of mapping, and extends it with the ability to backtrack not just within a level but between levels, and indeed between worlds: total replayability is the final ingredient in a topophile's sense of true ownership. Branching paths and secret exits are so common that the vast majority of the game is technically optional. Dragon Coins, Star World, and the Special Zone offer new ways to demonstrate skill. The coins spelling out "YOU ARE A SUPER PLAYER" at the end of Funky, and the count of cleared exits on the title screen, with that exciting star for getting all 96, are the series' first in-game acknowledgement that people were counting things beyond mere completion. (You may be wondering why, given these enhancements, I don't think SMW is the greatest Mario game. We'll come to that in time.)

Super Mario 64 echoes its predecessors in tracking progress and rewarding 100% completion, in offering secrets to the dedicated wanderer, and in having an interactive hub area with secrets of its own. But it engages with the power of exploration more fundamentally, by moving from a large number of linear levels to a small number of vast, open ones. Twenty years on, it's easy to forget how much of a change this was. You aren't just running to the right, and while some courses do have an obvious end-zone, a point as far away from the starting area as possible, it isn't always about getting there in time. For that matter, there isn't even a timer. (Though as fans of Course 14 will remember, there is a ticking clock.) The absence of a countdown is significant. Now there's nothing to prevent the player from exploring to his or her heart's content, and in fact the game requires exploration to a much greater degree than its predecessors. When the objective isn't obvious, you have to go looking for it. Coin collecting, once rewarded only with the occasional 1-Up, is now required, with each course granting a star for the finesse needed to find and reach eight red coins, and another for the stamina needed to find 100 regular ones.

The genius beyond the move to courses is the recognition that linearity just isn't satisfying in a 3D environment. 3D gaming represents the basic shape of the world much more accurately than 2D, and our experience of the actual world isn't linear. We may talk about going from Point A to Point B, but we know there are really a million other points along the way to be seen and, if we want, visited. This is, I think, why the drift in gaming as a whole has been toward open worlds and optional quests: it's the ultimate manifestation of that topophilic desire to explore.

SM 64 is, of course, not an open world game. Progress is gated by the star doors, especially early on, as the game forces you to learn the controls by completing specific challenges. But, although reaching the final level requires completion of a higher percentage of the game than in Super Mario World, the ways to reach that percentage allow for even more player choice than in the earlier game. Past a certain point you can tackle the courses in any order. They're still numbered to give a sense of progression, but you can go right to the highest number in each area if you want. And while you don't have total freedom within a course-- sometimes you can get a star other than the one the game means you to be working on, but not always-- there are easily enough options to satisfy any set of preferences, and to reward multiple playthroughs. Plus the eerie emptiness of Peach's castle makes for the best hub world in any Mario game to date.

I've never quite loved the next major Mario game, Super Mario Sunshine, and for a long time I wasn't quite sure why. I came close to figuring it out when I suggested to a friend that it seemed like the worlds were smaller than those in Super Mario 64. I'm not sure if that's actually true, but it feels like it is. The graphics are more refined, but the sense of something vast and strange waiting to be explored is gone. In part this is because Isle Delfino's worlds lack the variety and purity of other games. Most of them play too heavily on the tropical island/vacation paradise motif. That works pretty well for the hub world, but it gets monotonous. Broad themes like fire, ice, desert, and sky may be less realistic than amusement parks and sandy beaches, but Mario's not about realism. It's about imagination, about worlds that are actually as wondrous as children imagine their neighborhoods to be.

It doesn't help that the water cannon, while it allows some limited new gameplay, expands Mario's moveset too far. The Super Mario 64 moveset was just large enough to give the player options for many challenges while requiring them to master particular maneuvers for others. The water cannon's Hover mode, by contrast, allows them to do whatever jump they want and float for a few seconds to make up any slack. It's death to precision platforming. And while platforming isn't as important in 3D Mario games as in 2D ones, because exploration has stolen its thunder and because 3D platforming is almost never as satisfying as the 2D equivalent, it's still pretty darn important.

The biggest problem, though, is that where SM 64 brought the joy of moving in 3D, all Sunshine has to offer for novelty is cleaning up paint. Someone (I can't remember who) once described the game as "Super Mario 64 2 with a water cannon." They didn't mean it as an insult, and neither do I, but certainly the game lacks the sense of evolution from their predecessors you feel in the best installments: Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario 64, and our next topic, Super Mario Galaxy.

If the player of SM 64 and Super Mario Sunshine was, like Alexander the Great in the famous (mis)quotation, left weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer, Super Mario Galaxy opened up a new frontier: outer space. Taking its cue from the Sunshine levels where the water cannon is stolen and Mario must use his traditional moveset to traverse linear sequences of platforms floating in space. This dash of pure platforming provides a nice contrast to the main exploratory modes and, for me at least, was the highlight of a game that, for all its virtues, lacked that certain something.

Super Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, had it in spades. When I bought myself a Wii in 2008, it came in a bundle with Galaxy and four other games. Galaxy was, of course, the first one I tried, and about five minutes after starting it I went on a message board I shared with some friends and wrote "OH MY GOD THE WII IS AWESOME". A friend, not sure what I'd been playing, replied "That about covers my initial reaction. If you don't have it yet, your very next game purchase should be Super Mario Galaxy."

I said earlier that I think Super Mario Bros. 3 was a strong contender for the best Mario game ever. The only real competition is the Galaxy games. Leaving solid ground behind allowed for a freeform approach to level design that mixed the best of 2D and 3D, exploration and platforming. And flying between planets is, well, "AWESOME." If there's a power children want as much as mastery of their neighborhoods, it's the power of flight. Tying that power to motion controls makes the fantasy truly immersive. And the sight of icy landscapes and haunted houses floating in space is as entertainingly bonkers as the anything-goes level design of SMB 3. For me, the most memorable levels in that game were the ones that left behind solid ground in favor of platforms mysteriously floating in mid-air, and the scattered planets of Galaxy are a natural extension of that. They also allow the developers to pursue whatever gameplay concept they want in the moment. Sudden turn to 2D? Abrupt sequence of narrow platforms? Upside-down sequences? Why not? It's that sort of openness that marks the true Mario classics. Even Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 feel a little too literally and figuratively grounded by comparison.

Unlike Sunshine, Galaxy brings a lot of new ideas to the gameplay. The motion controls are perfectly executed, enhancing and flavoring play rather than unnecessarily taking it over. It's true that the spin jump, like the Hover Cannon, gives Mario a little too much room to maneuver, but the platforming seems to have been designed with that in mind. The very imprecision of the pointer controls is integrated into the challenge of collecting Star Bits and moving between Pull Stars. Another echo of SMB3 is the goofy new suits. You have to credit the developers for coming up with suit concepts that feel original both in concept and in gameplay, and in tailoring levels to the suits' capacities. The spacing of platforms in the Honeyhive galaxy, for example, is perfect for the duration and movement of Bee Mario's hover gauge.

Given the rapturous critical reception of Galaxy, Nintendo had no reason not to offer up more of the same with Galaxy 2. There's not much to say about the sequel. That another full game of consistently high quality was possible is a reflection of the excellence of the basic design. The bump in difficulty was also a nice touch. I'm not a difficulty fetishist-- some people have fun exploring games rather than battling them, and that's fine-- but the integration of Hint TVs that show how to proceed, and the Super Guide, which takes over and finishes the level at the cost of a cosmetic difference in the Power Star received, allow all types of player to have a satisfying experience. Completing The Perfect Run, the game's final level, which forces you to complete several demanding sequences without taking a single hit, is one of my proudest gaming moments, matched, I think, only by getting the Gold Crown in Kingdom Hearts II.

One bump in the road in Galaxy 2 is the movement from a large hub world to an odd hybrid of hub world and world map. It doesn't mean much on its own, but it does point to some of the larger problems of recent Mario games. Since Galaxy 2, the series hasn't so much innovated as moved backward, mixing elements from older games into the 3D era. The resulting games are enjoyable enough, but they don't reach the heights of titles that have more novelty up their sleeves.

The trouble began with New Super Mario Bros. for the DS. There was nothing wrong with doing a new 2D game, but this one misunderstood what made the earlier Bros. games great. The move to 3D character models and a more subdued color scheme reduces the cartoon charm of the setting, but the problems are more than cosmetic. There's not much about this New game that's actually new, and what there is is underwhelming. The Mega Mushroom feels empowering the first five or six times, but it's not so much a fresh gameplay idea as a visually distinctive way to walk through a level. The Mini Mushroom is better-- slightly different physics, alternate routes to take-- but it lacks the sense of true transformation you get from suits, and dying after a single hit makes it feel more like a power-down than a power-up. And the blue Koopa Shell... well, maybe I'm alone here, but I don't recall using it beyond the level where it was introduced. It just wasn't fun.

The later New games are better. The suits are generally excellent. The coin collecting in the sequel is cute, and I'm sure the multiplayer in the console versions is great for people who like couch co-op. But the minimal integration of the consoles' distinct features is a shame, and the controllers are a distraction. The Wiimote and especially the GamePad simply aren't designed for 2D platformers. (To be honest, I'm not sure what type of game the GamePad is designed for.) The biggest problem, though, is the dullness of the level designs. Very little whimsy, and very little variety. Across all four games there are perhaps two levels that stick out in my mind: the finale to the Wii title, which is very good, and the Buzzy Beetles in World 7-6 of the same game, which sound neat but end up feeling like any other moving-platforms-in-space level. The spark just isn't there.

Nor can it be found in the recent 3D games, which move toward short, linear levels linked by a world map. Linearity in 3D doesn't feel rewarding because the joy of exploration is lost, and it doesn't help that the camera can't really handle it; useful angles are frequently locked out. Moving away from courses toward discrete levels ought to allow for more design innovation, but it's hard to escape the feeling that you've seen most of this before. Jumping between random levels limits the sense of progression; you're doing one thing and then another, not exploring a world. The power-ups have their charm and allow for some individual challenges that captivate. But overall, I have to wonder if SM64 and Galaxy between them have simply done all there is to do in 3D Mario.

I'm aware that my mixed opinion of the latest 3D titles isn't shared by most gamers. The reviews for 3D Land and 3D World are as 9-studded as for any other Mario game. And up to a point, that's fair. There's never going to be a bad Mario platformer. Nintendo has too much riding on the franchise to release a game that isn't polished, balanced, and basically rewarding to play. But the question is, what happens when the novelty wears off? I think it's fair to suggest that Sunshine, for example, is no longer quite as well-regarded as it was on release. (This is why the argument for the blurring effect of nostalgia is problematic; some games just don't generate that kind of after-the-fact enthusiasm.) I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that will happen with the recent titles, but it's a possibility.

Either way, there's room to debate where Mario games will go next. They might get another game or two out of linear 3D, but what could come after that? The competition is inching toward virtual reality; could Nintendo move in that direction? It would certainly be the next step in this exploration motif I've been harping on. But would a character as improbably athletic as Mario work in that mode? Answers are difficult, especially with a company as unpredictable as Nintendo. And yet that unpredictability so often works in their favor. That's why I'm confident that sooner or later they'll find a new approach to Mario that not only succeeds, but redefines the franchise in the way that Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Galaxy did. Give it a few more years, and there might well be a new contender for best Mario game ever, something for my children to debate the nostalgia-fogged merits of twenty or thirty years from now.